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1 Plato, Byzantium and the Italian Plato, Byzantium and the Italian Renaissance Jonathan Harris The ideas of the Athenian philosopher, Plato (429-347 BC), encapsulated in the form of dialogues, have exerted such an abiding influence on western philosophy and political thought that it is easy to forget that for many centuries, between about 500 and 1400, his works were almost unknown in western Europe. This was partly because very few people in Medieval Europe knew enough Greek to read Plato and even if they had, copies of the Dialogues were almost impossible to obtain, with only the Timaeus available in Latin translation. Scholars were therefore largely dependent on earlier Latin authors such as Cicero and St Augustine for a second-hand knowledge of Plato's ideas. 1 It was the rediscovery of the Dialogues in the original during the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century that set western thought off on new paths, a rediscovery that was made possible by the preservation and transmission of Plato's work by scholars in another part of the Christian world, the Byzantine empire or Byzantium. In Byzantium, the literary language was not Latin but Greek, and therefore classical Greek literature continued to be studied and read throughout the medieval period. In the empire's capital city of Constantinople, the works of the ancient Greek poets, historians, dramatists and philosophers were taught in a traditional course of higher education that trained laymen for the imperial civil service. 2 Plato was by no means the most popular author on the higher education curriculum, however, for there were several aspects of his thought which were extremely difficult to reconcile with Christian doctrine. In the Dialogue known in English as the Republic , for example, Plato described the transmigration of souls ( metempsychosis ), the idea that souls of the 1 dead await a new body in which to be reborn, something completely at odds with the Christian teaching that souls await only resurrection and judgment. Plato also advocated the sharing of wives which is hardly compatible with the Christian ideal of marriage. 3 Consequently, in 529 the Emperor Justinian (527-565) had closed the Platonic Academy in Athens and thereafter showing too much enthusiasm for Plato's writings could incur the disapproval of the Church. 4 There were, however, courageous individuals who were prepared to run the risk. One poet described Plato as the 'teacher of immortality' and the statesman Michael Psellos (c.1022-c.1080) openly expressed his admiration for Platonic thought in his memoirs. He may even have espoused aspects of Plato's political thought and applied it to the situation in his own day. 5 Another Byzantine Platonist was George Gemistos Plethon (c.1360-1452) who went so far as to incorporate elements of Plato's philosophy into letters of advice sent to members of the Byzantine royal family. 6 Both men aroused the suspicion of the ecclesiastical authorities. Psellos was on one occasion called to justify himself before the ecclesiastical synod while Plethon was exiled from Constantinople to Mistra in the Peloponnese on suspicion of holding heretical views. Yet the study of Plato did not always lead to accusations of doctrinal deviance. Even the emperor responsible for exiling Plethon, Manuel II Palaeologos (1391-1425), a man renowned for his piety, saw nothing wrong with choosing a copy of the works of Plato as a gift for an old friend. 7 It is likely, however, that Manuel II had much weightier matters on his mind than Platonic philosophy, for by the time he became emperor in 1391, the Byzantine empire was in a state of terminal decline. Its territories had slowly been eaten away by the remorseless advance of the Ottoman Turks. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, Constantinople was surrounded and under siege, and it seemed that it would only be a matter of time before the city fell. Manuel II and 2 his advisers fell back on the only policy that now seemed open too them: they decided to appeal for help to their co-religionists in western Europe. 8 The transmission of Plato to the West was to be a by-product of this decision. To negotiate western aid, a number of ambassadors were despatched, including Manuel Chrysoloras (c.1350-1415), a personal friend of Manuel II and a product of the Byzantine system of higher education. Although his mission was primarily diplomatic, Chrysoloras supplemented his income while in Venice in 1394 by giving some lessons in ancient Greek to a Florentine gentleman called Roberto Rossi. On his return to his native city, Rossi passed an enthusiastic account of his teacher to Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406), the Chancellor of Florence. So impressed was Salutati that he decided to secure Chrysoloras's services, and in 1396 invited him to teach grammar and Greek literature at the University of Florence. Chrysoloras duly came and had a tremendous impact. His lectures were thronged with eager learners and among his pupils were numbered some of the foremost Italian intellectuals of the day, such as Guarino da Verona (1374-1460) and Pallas Strozzi (1372-1462). Such was the enthusiasm with which his presence was greeted that the contemporary writer Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) claimed that Chrysoloras had restored to the Italians a knowledge of classical Greek, which had been lost for seven hundred years. 9 How can all this enthusiasm be accounted for? There can be no doubt that there was real hunger in Italy for a knowledge of ancient Greek. The movement that has come to be known as the Renaissance developed during the later fourteenth century as scholars and artists rediscovered the 'humanist' values of Roman literature and classical art. Yet these early Renaissance scholars were painfully aware that they were only getting half the picture. Roman authors such as Cicero and Seneca constantly referred to Greek authors but for these writers the Italians either had no texts or if 3 they had, they could not read them. This was the predicament faced by the Florentine poet Francesco Petrarca or Petrarch (1304-1374). Although he acquired a manuscript of the works of Homer in 1348, despite all his efforts, he was never able to learn enough Greek to be able to read it. 10 Chrysoloras created a sensation in Florence because of his teaching methods. He pioneered a way of simplifying Greek grammar in his textbook, the Erotemata or 'Questions' and so provided a way out of the difficulty faced by Petrarch. Chrysoloras only occupied the post at Florence between 1397 and 1400 when he left and moved on to Pavia and Milan, before travelling extensively throughout Europe in his quest for aid for beleaguered Constantinople. 11 During this time he became involved in another activity that was to have great long-term significance. Realising that there were many who wanted to gain access to the ideas contained in ancient Greek literature who, like Petrarch, would never learn Greek, he gave his assistance to the Milanese scholar, Uberto Decembrio (d.1427), in his efforts to produce a Latin translation of a Greek text. Translations from Greek to Latin had been made before but they had followed a word for word approach which made them turgid to read. Chrysoloras and Decembrio instead adopted a technique which conveyed the spirit of the text in a Latin of some literary merit. 12 Even more radical than Chrysoloras and Decembrio's method, however, was their choice of text. Rather than going for something purely literary, they decided to translate Plato's Republic . Why they should make this choice is not entirely clear but a possible reason is found in Decembrio's introduction to the translation where it is suggested that Plato's authority could be cited against republican liberty. 13 Traditionally, the Italian city-states had embraced in theory an Aristotelian and Ciceronian ideal, that man was 'a political animal' and that it was in his nature and his duty to participate in the political life of his city. 14 While not democracies in the strict sense, 4 these city-states usually had some mechanism whereby the citizen body could gather in the main piazza and express its approval or disapproval of decisions taken by the city government. By the later Middle Ages, however, some intellectuals were questioning whether wide participation in the political process really provided the best protection for liberty or whether it merely gave rise to factionalism detrimental to the best interests of the state. Politics, it was coming to be argued, should be left rather to those who were best qualified to pursue them, a wise and enlightened elite, who had the wealth and education to devote to matters of state. A life of contemplative withdrawal and disengagement from political life, formerly seen as reprehensible, was now coming to be regarded as praiseworthy. All this was not merely a matter of philosophical speculation, for it mirrored changes that were taking place in the way that the Italian city states were governed and of which the result was usually to place the political process under the control of an upper class of nobles. In Venice, the aristocratic Great Council and the Council of Ten had come to dominate decision-making, leaving the General Assembly of the citizens as merely a rubber stamp. Florence, after 1382, was dominated by conservative patricians, with power concentrated in fewer hands, providing a government that was less representative but probably much more stable and efficient. 15 In this climate, Plato's ideas, especially those outlined in the Republic and the Laws , were extremely attractive to Florentine and other Italian intellectuals, most of whom were part of the new governing elite.
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